" ..."

The events described in the following passage took place during the 8-year Iran-Iraq war that occurred in the 1980s after the 1979 revolution. During the war, Iraq bombed Tehran many times.

***

"You don't know what we have suffered," she said at last. "Last week they dropped a bomb near our house. It fell on an apartment building. The neighbors said that in one of the flats there was a birthday party and some twenty-odd children were killed.

"Immediately after the bombs fell and before the ambulances came, six or seven motorcycles arrived from nowhere and started circling the area. The riders all wore black, with red headbands across their foreheads. They started shouting slogans: *Death to America! Death to Saddam! Death to Khomeini!* People were very quiet. They just watched them with hatred. Some tried to go forward to help the wounded, but the thugs wouldn't let anyone go near the place. They kept shouting, "War! War! Until victory!" How do you think we all felt as we stood there watching them?"

This was a ritual: after the bombings, these emissaries of death would prevent any sign of mourning or protest. When two of my cousins were killed by the Islamic regime, some of my relatives who were now on the side of the government called my uncle to congratulate him on the death of his son and daughter-in-law.

--*Reading Lolita in Tehran: a Memoir in Books,* by Azar Nafisi, p. 211.